I participate in everyone of those investment vehicles, but they are passive (I have no control of the outcome, management, financials, other) and my only control is the capital I put in and the return I pull out (if any), based on the speculation of my research.Even my large mulifamily investments are passive, I do not have any say outside of my agreements and even within my agreements (when I get my money back and how much) my say is limited and subject to risk.What I do control, are the investments that I own 100% or a high percentage (majority owner) under my leadership strategy. 

It's called the Pitbull Conference. 

In college, I tried to create good relationships with people who I thought were smart, had good leadership skills, and who were good people I could trust down the road.

You will learn a lot from a business major about communication, leadership, and the basics of business.Try to find local REI clubs, that is also a great place to get to know others in the field and they'll surely be impressed to help out.

So within a week I was sitting in a hotel conference room with about 300 other people and about $5K less in my wallet.

Was there a recent lease-option conference or something I missed the past week?

Your first visit as a guest is free.KCIG is no longer, but some of their former leadership team still host occasional get-togethers, including a networking event the first Saturday of most months.

It was really tough to do, and required hundreds of pages of docs, a few site visits, and countless hours on conference calls, but in the end it was well worth the work.We got to deal with some pretty savvy investors, some great RE attorneys, and make a new connection to a lender with which we'd later fund over $20 million in commercial hard money loans.

An office is a LOT of overhead... even if you do a time-share/co-op type place where you share space and have common conference rooms.I would first try to get control of the house you're in.

If I were there, I would have struck up a conversation with the seller and worked some questions into the flow of the conversation that would clarify if the seller is open to creative acquisition strategies (I would have told the agent that I was going to talk to the seller if the conversation didn't just initiate naturally...don't surprise the agent).If you want to talk to the seller now, after you've left the property, you should go to your agent and ask if she'd be willing to ask the seller if she would participate in a conference call.